The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (2 page)

The rest of us became indignant about Trevor. What had he taken? Apparently the missing items included some small pieces of antique silver and the gold bracelet with
Ray
engraved on it which Howard had given his dead lover. We must phone the police, we said, but Howard had lapsed again into indifference and said they would never catch him. Nonsense, we said, who was this Trevor? Where did he come from? Howard had no idea. He didn’t even know his surname. He was just Trevor.

That night Howard gave a word perfect and acceptable performance as the police inspector in
Murder Must Out.
We were all relieved and Len, who had been disgruntled all day, seemed mollified. He offered Howard’s conduct to Jane and me as an instance of ‘what professionalism is all about’.

Howard never broke down or failed to perform adequately on stage; he merely settled into a state of inert gloom, and his misery was compounded by a number of unpleasant shocks. As he repeatedly insisted to us, he had never expected anything from Ray’s will, but to be left nothing except Ray’s portrait in oils was obviously a disappointment. Other more substantial bequests were made to various friends in the town, and the bulk of Ray’s fortune, including the lease on Saxon’s and the flat, was left to Ray’s son, Terry. Howard, like the rest of us, had known nothing of Terry’s existence but he was soon to be made painfully aware of it when Terry and his wife arrived for the funeral. They treated Howard as a miscellaneous nuisance and he was blamed for the theft of the silver which apparently ‘belonged to the family’. He was given twenty-four hours in which to vacate the flat.

At the height of the holiday season it was hard to find somewhere to stay, but a number of unexpected people, indignant about his treatment, offered Howard a room in their houses. He refused them all. Howard felt he needed solitude rather than sympathy, so, with his few possessions and the portrait in oils of Ray, he took up residence in one of the unused dressing rooms of the Grand Theatre, sleeping on a mattress on the floor.

This was strictly speaking not allowed, but the management of the company was based in London and Len, who was its representative, did not have the heart to forbid him the theatre. Though none of us admitted as much, we all found Howard’s decision to sleep at the Grand disquieting. A theatre is a place to visit and perform in; to live there is to inhabit a limbo. We would happily talk to him on the stairs or in the Green Room, but we avoided visiting him in his dressing room. The cause of our reluctance was the portrait.

It was a three-quarter length of Ray as a young man at the zenith of his coarse good looks. There was a slight smile on his parted lips and a vacancy in the blue eyes which seemed to look out of the canvas, over the shoulder of a viewer, like a social climber at a cocktail party. With its gaudy flesh tones, confident brush strokes and bright blue background the painting was clearly the work of a journeyman artist of some accomplishment and no talent. Yet, for all its slick vacuity, the painting held one’s reluctant attention, perhaps because the manner of its execution so clearly complemented the nature of its subject. In its elaborate gilded frame it hung on the wall of Howard’s dressing room, presiding over his few sombre possessions.

‘He was the love of my life and I’ll never see him again,’ said Howard when he first showed me the picture. I tried hard to keep my prejudices in abeyance, but I found Ray’s domination over Howard’s thoughts even more repulsive in death than it was in life. Howard seemed to make no effort to work through his grief; he was held in suspension. His conversation, never lively at the best of times, trod the same dreadful circle of mourning and memory day after day. It was inevitable perhaps that some clairvoyant at his spiritualist church would vouchsafe him the information that Ray had passed safely over and was ‘watching over him’. Howard repeated this phrase to us with melancholy satisfaction, but we thought of the picture and shuddered.

Some weeks went by during which I became used to Howard’s peculiar way of life and stopped worrying about it. I was young and the sun shone. The adventure of acting engrossed me and his tragedy became little more than the sombre shade which threw the hopeful colours of my existence into greater relief.

Towards the end of July I began to notice that there was sometimes alcohol on Howard’s breath when I was on stage with him. This was disturbing in someone whose avowed rule was never to take a drink before a show, but, as his performance did not seem to suffer, I took little notice. One evening I came into the theatre early and heard voices coming from Howard’s dressing room, which was the one nearest the stage door entrance. One of the voices was Howard’s, the other—unintelligible—was a hissing whisper. I thought Howard might have been going through his lines, but the words he spoke were not from any play. Interspersed with the strange indecipherable whisper they were:

‘No . . . No, don’t . . . No, don’t say that . . . No don’t . . .’

Feeling acutely embarrassed I turned back and shut the stage door loudly, coughing as I did so, to make Howard believe that I had just come in. The voice and the whisper stopped abruptly. Howard came out of his dressing room and asked me how I was. He did not seem unduly agitated, just a little dazed. Peering through his open door I noticed that the taps of his dressing room basin were on. The pipes hissed, and I reassured myself that this was the whispering I had heard.

**

My digs were not far from the theatre. I occupied a single roomed ‘holiday flatlet’ on the top floor of a block of similar rooms. My window looked down the street towards the Grand Theatre. One hot, airless night in early August it was open. I went to sleep to the familiar sounds of desultory traffic and the occasional late reveller; then at about two in the morning I awoke suddenly. I thought I had heard a cry of alarm, though it was hard to say of what kind because I had woken out of a tangle of dreams.

I went to the window and looked out. The street was deserted; no voices were to be heard, but there was something unnatural about what I saw. It was the light. There seemed to be a glow where there should not have been. I looked further out of the window and smelt something acrid on the night air. I could just see one of the windows of the theatre brightly lit from the inside by a yellow flickering light. Slowly my waking mind gathered these impressions together and formed a conclusion. The Grand Theatre was on fire.

I ran down three flights of stairs and had just got to the pay phone in the hall when I heard the ring of fire engine bells sweeping down the road to the theatre. Howard was inside the building and I knew where he was. The next moment I was running down the road towards the fire.

The hours that followed are a confused memory. I have no idea what I did most of the time but I know that it was seven o’clock and the sun was well up when someone drove me back to my digs from the hospital and I was still wearing pyjamas and dressing gown. It all seems more of a dream to me as I remember it, because, as in a dream, I was helpless and inappropriately dressed.

I remember the black acrid smoke billowing out of a first floor dressing room window, the steam and spray of the hoses. I remember shouting in a fireman’s ear for what seemed like minutes, trying to make him understand that there was someone in the building, the long agonising moments before Howard’s unconscious body was dragged out, the ride to the hospital, attempts to resuscitate him and their failure. Even now it is only my reason which can place these events in their true sequence.

When the dawn came the theatre was a blackened smoking shell and Howard was dead. His presence in the theatre that night caused infinite trouble. The insurance company refused to pay up because, they argued, he was there illegally, and his presence may have caused the fire. The Tudno Bay Council who owned the theatre sued the management of our theatre company, and the management contemplated suing us. As it happened no-one paid up because the cause of the fire was never definitively established. All that was certain was that it had not begun in Howard’s dressing room. He had died of suffocation from the smoke fumes.

A few days after the fire the company dispersed. Jane and I alone stayed on to go to Howard’s funeral. It was a deeply melancholy affair because, apart from an elderly aunt who had travelled over from Liverpool, Howard appeared to have no close relatives and Jane and I were the only friends present. The only other person to attend the cremation was one of the firemen. After the service he came over to speak to me. It was clear that something was on his mind. After some moments of inconsequential talk, I asked if he was the one who had carried Howard out of the burning building.

‘No,’ said the fireman, ‘I was there, but that was Dafydd. He can’t be here. Off sick. Funny thing, you know. Dafydd’s a good man, a strong man: not much upsets him, but that fire did. It was something he saw when he was getting your man out. There was a lot of smoke, as you know, and the things in his room were all smoke-damaged. You know what I mean? When everything gets covered with this thin layer of soot. You can never get the smell out of things when they’ve been smoke-damaged. Terrible. But Dafydd could see that there was one thing in that room that was not smoke-damaged at all, and he couldn’t find no explanation, see. It upset him no end, and I for one don’t blame him. It’s all very odd, you see.’

When I asked him what item it was that had escaped the smoke damage I had already guessed, but I wanted to be wrong.

‘It was this painting. Portrait it was. Good piece of art, I’d say. A young man, kind of smiling. Handsome face, not nice though. Forensics have it and they can’t explain no smoke-damage either. Another funny thing. Your man, he’d not died asleep, as he might have done had he been suffocated with that smoke. He’d woken up and tried to get out. Now it’s natural for people to get confused in smoke-filled rooms, but he’d found the door all right. There was blood on the handle and his hands were all bloody too. But why didn’t he manage to get out? The door was never locked or anything.’

The fireman paused and looked into the distance at nothing in particular. I sensed that he had more to tell.

‘You know, there was this old lady who lived over the road. She was the one who rang the fire brigade. She swears she heard voices coming from that building. From two people, not just the one. One was frantic, screaming like, but there was another, sort of slow, a bit drunk like, laughing almost. She said that voice fair gave her the horrors, much more even than the screaming, which was bad enough.’

‘Did she hear what the voice was saying?’

‘Nothing much. Just “How . . . ard! . . . How . . . ard! . . . How . . . ard!” Like that. Fair gave me a fright even to hear her saying it. Wasn’t that the name of your friend who died?’

We were incapable of responding. When the fireman had left us Jane and I walked for a while in the dreary crematorium garden without speaking.

‘Well, at least he’s free of Ray now,’ I said eventually.

‘Not unless he wants to be,’ Jane replied.

FENG SHUI

When Mr Pearmain discovered irregularities in some of the overseas accounts of Stolz International, the firm for which he worked, he went straight to his superior and reported the fact. The superior thanked Mr Pearmain politely and said that this was a serious matter which would receive his immediate attention. Some weeks went by before Mr Pearmain went to his superior again. Irregularities were still occurring: what was being done? The superior said that the situation was being dealt with ‘through the appropriate channels’. Once again he thanked Mr Pearmain politely, and if there was a touch of frostiness about his courtesy Pearmain, who was not sensitive to such nuances, failed to notice. Months passed; further irregularities were discovered and reported by Mr Pearmain. By this time even he had begun to notice that he was being shunned by his colleagues. One of them hinted to Mr Pearmain that he would be well advised to drop the matter of the overseas accounts, but Mr Pearmain did not understand. He was an accountant; it was his job to see that the company accounts were in good order. He would be failing in his duty to Stolz International if he did nothing.

Pearmain began to find that he was put under pressure at work; he was made to fulfil impossible and unnecessary deadlines. As a result his health suffered and for the first time in his life he found himself having to take days off work. His superior spoke to him kindly: was this the right job for him? Would he not feel more comfortable in a less stressful and high-powered environment? Perhaps it would be best if they were to let him go? Pearmain, whose powers of resistance had been carefully eroded, agreed and he left Stolz International.

His wife Alice received the news with mingled irritation and relief. She was glad that he was no longer under pressure; at the same time she was aware that it was his scrupulous, unimaginative honesty which had brought them to this pass. The very quality for which she loved him was the one which she now found most exasperating. They had two sons, both at expensive schools, what were they to do? Pearmain could get freelance work, but it would not be nearly so well paid as his position with Stolz.

The Pearmains lived at Lime House, a handsome, detached Victorian mansion in a street of similar mansions on the outskirts of Cheltenham where Stolz, which manufactured electronic guidance systems for aircraft, was located. The house was a little too large and too expensive for them, but they had bought it when Pearmain joined the firm because Alice had loved it at first sight and Pearmain always trusted her instincts as a blind man trusts a sighted person to guide him across the road. However, in their newly straitened circumstances, a large sacrifice was necessary, and selling Lime House was the obvious one to make.

Of course, it was the wrong time to sell, or so the estate agent told them, and Alice spent long, dispiriting afternoons that Spring showing indifferent couples around those high-ceilinged well-proportioned rooms. The couples looked at all that space and remarked that it must cost an awful lot to heat, mustn’t it? Alice, whose honesty was, in its own way, as scrupulous as her husband’s, admitted that it did. But never had she loved the house more than in those dismal days: its comfortable bay windows in which you could sit and look out onto the world, the big unpretentious entrance hall where bicycles and boots could be kept without there being any danger of tripping over them, its intricately moulded plaster cornices and ceiling roses, its plain marble fireplaces and the long-lawned garden shaded by a great lime which gave the house its name. Lime House was a place where you had room to think.

One day Alice opened the door to another prospective buyer, a tall, ginger-haired woman in her late thirties. She was wearing a very smart purple tracksuit and looked slim and fit. She announced herself as Heather Billing. Alice, who had a habit of forming instant likes and dislikes to people, took against Heather Billing at once, not violently, but enough to make her constantly ill-at-ease in Heather’s presence. The unease was compounded when she discovered that Heather’s husband worked for the very firm that Mr Pearmain had just left, Stolz International.

In her favour, Heather was the first of the would-be buyers to express unqualified enthusiasm for the house. She just loved it. She thought that the spaces were ‘amazingly energising’; then she said that she thought the house had ‘great possibilities’. Alice stiffened at this: to her the house was a place of actualities not possibilities. She asked Heather politely what she meant.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Heather, ‘you must think that’s awfully rude, Alice.’ Her accent and the speed with which she had progressed to Christian name terms betrayed transatlantic origins. ‘You see I was talking from my own personal viewpoint. My chart told me it was favourable to move into this area. We’re coming from Winchcombe so we’d be moving towards the horse, which happens to be my sign.’ Alice raised her eyebrows in enquiry. ‘Chinese astrology,’ Heather explained.

‘How interesting,’ said Alice whose attendance at the local parish church every Sunday was the limit of her spiritual voyaging.

‘There’s lots of Chi energy in this house. It could flow really well.’

‘Really?’Alice had adopted that condescending would-be-interested manner which members of royalty assume when talking to ballet dancers. Heather, who detected the hauteur in Alice’s voice, decided to demonstrate her own brand of superiority.

‘I expect you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, have you?’ she said. ‘Feng Shui. It’s the traditional ancient Chinese art of geomancy. I’ve made quite a study of it. As a matter of fact, I’m a qualified Feng Shui consultant.’

‘Ah, yes, I know!’ said Alice. ‘You go into people’s houses and rearrange their furniture.’

‘There’s a little more to it than that—Oh, isn’t this the neatest little room!’

It was fortunate that the tour of the house had brought them just then to this particular room on the ground floor because the discussion might otherwise have become acrimonious. The charm of their surroundings, however, distracted them both.

It was a square parlour off the main drawing room with a window overlooking the garden. Alice had adopted it as her private sanctum. Thinking the word ‘study’ too grandiose, she called it her ‘little office’. In it she dealt with household matters, telephoned her friends and kept her favourite books, together with the few mementoes of her life before she had married Pearmain. Along the window sill were seedlings germinating in trays and cuttings in pots. On the walls were framed family photographs.

‘I guess this is your favourite room too,’ said Heather.

‘Yes.’

Heather nodded with satisfaction and surveyed the room carefully. Alice felt that an intimate part of herself was being scrutinised by strange eyes. It was uncomfortable and she tried to distract Heather by pointing out the view over the garden. Heather paid no attention to this. She was observing the family photographs, the kind of books Alice read; she was absorbing information and making deductions. Then she noticed against the wall by the door a carved oak cabinet, standing on bulbous legs, black with age.

‘That’s an interesting old piece,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Alice, putting on her condescending voice again. ‘It’s what they call a muniment cupboard. For storing documents.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Heather, one of whose previous enthusiasms had been restoring antique furniture. ‘Is it genuine seventeenth century?’

‘Quite possibly. I’m sure the central panel is. Rather wonderful, don’t you think? Adam and Eve in the garden.’

The front of the cupboard was a single rectangular piece of wood which opened down to the horizontal, like the lid of a desk. There it was held in place by a light metal chain. Unopened it presented to the viewer a panel in crude, vigorous low relief inside a broad border of carved leaves. The scene in low relief depicted Adam and Eve, naked, standing on either side of the tree. Round the tree was twined a serpent which was almost as big as the tree itself. It was looking intently at Eve who held a large apple in her hand, hesitantly, as if she wanted to return it to the snake.

‘Forgive me,’ said Heather. ‘I know this sounds strange, but your cupboard kind of looks out of place in this room.’

‘Ah, there speaks the Feng Shui expert!’ said Alice. Heather was beginning to find this very ordinary looking woman with her twinkling dowager manner intensely annoying. Like most people with little sense of humour Heather was suspicious of those who possessed it, especially when the humour seemed to be directed against her. Alice, sensing from her tight smile that Heather might not enjoy being teased, modified her manner.

‘As a matter of fact,’ she went on, ‘it belongs here more than I do in a sense. It was the only piece of furniture left behind by the previous occupants, and they left it here because it was there when
they
came. Before that the house was owned by an old bachelor called Mr Abney who lived here with a housekeeper. This is going back before the war. There are still people around who remember him. Not fondly, I’m afraid. No particular reason, just that he was eccentric. “Queer” was the word used, though, of course, in the old traditional sense of odd. Not, you know . . .’

Alice stopped herself. She knew she had been rattling on in her usual way without noticing if Heather was listening or not. She often did this to her husband, but it was embarrassing with a stranger. Heather, however, was watching her intently.

‘Don’t stop. This is fascinating!’

Alice resumed her story more self-consciously. ‘Well, all I was going to say is that I’m pretty sure that the cupboard was old Abney’s, because when I opened it up, inside I found all these . . . “pamphlets”, I suppose you’d call them. They’re still there.’

She turned the key in the lock of the cupboard and let down the Adam and Eve panel. Inside was a double arcade of pigeon holes separated by little wooden Tuscan pilasters. Each of the pigeon holes was stuffed with yellowing paper booklets.

‘I’m afraid I’ve never bothered to clear them out,’ said Alice apologetically. ‘I don’t quite know why.’ She took out one of the booklets and read out the title on its front cover.

‘
Alchemical Symbols Explained: Their Application in Modern Science
by Ignatius Abney B.A. Oxon. Hyperion Press 1934. I think he obviously printed them privately. I doubt if they were great sellers.’ She picked up another. ‘
Eugenius: or the True Cult of the Race Soul
. Oh, dear! Now, wait a minute, here’s something which is more in your line:
Matter and Daemon: On the direction of Spirit Force through Physical Objects
. Isn’t that a bit like your Feng Shui?’

‘No,’ said Heather decisively. ‘Nothing like. This stuff is just weird.’

After that, the viewing of the house was conducted in a brisk, businesslike way and when Heather asked Alice if the place did not cost a lot to heat she replied ‘Not really’. Two days later the estate agent rang up to tell Alice that Mr and Mrs Billing had made an offer for the house which was not insultingly below the asking price. The Pearmains accepted.

**

Heather’s husband, Jack, was a little disturbed to hear that they were buying a house off the Pearmains. He had heard of Mr Pearmain’s exit from the firm and was uneasy about it. Nevertheless, he had felt it best that Pearmain should go because, as he had remarked to a colleague, Pearmain was ‘not fully in tune with the prevailing culture of a leading-edge firm like Stolz.’ Jack Billing had an effortless command of such language which was why he was near the top of the ladder in Marketing.

When the Billings and their three children moved in to Lime House Heather appropriated Alice’s ‘little office’ as her ‘private space’. She found, as she had expected, that Alice had left the old muniment cupboard behind. This pleased her. Heather, not being a sentimentalist, had decided to sell it. In the meanwhile it had to be moved from where it was because it was trapping all the Chi energies in the room.

It was some weeks, however, before Heather was able to do anything about her little space because she was so busy arranging everyone else’s. Organising other people’s lives was Heather’s passion in life, which was one of the reasons why she had taken up Feng Shui. (Before Feng Shui she had done counselling, but this had not been a success because she discovered that, strangely, listening rather than advising was thought to be the main task of the counsellor.) Heather’s family consented to her bossiness because they recognised the essential benevolence behind the urge to dominate. Her arrangements, whether of furniture or feelings, were nearly always convenient and comfortable.

At last one afternoon Heather was able to start work on her own room, bare except for one object, the muniment cupboard. The room needed painting (blue for meditation) and the cupboard needed moving. She opened the door of the cupboard and found, to her surprise, that all the pamphlets were gone from their pigeon holes. Heather had been planning to burn them, but Alice must have anticipated her wishes. The cupboard really needed to be moved out of the room altogether—black was quite the wrong colour for her space—but Heather had no help that afternoon, so she decided simply to shift it from its present position to the opposite corner of the room where it would be less conspicuous. Heather was strong and fit but she had great difficulty in moving the cupboard. It was unusually heavy for its size and on several occasions threatened to topple over. At last it was done; the cupboard was in a place where it would not dominate the whole room. It was not an ideal solution but it would do.